Time-course of eye movement-related decrease in vividness and emotionality of unpleasant autobiographical memories

The time-course of changes in vividness and emotionality of unpleasant autobiographical memories associated with making eye movements (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, EMDR) was investigated. Participants retrieved unpleasant autobiographical memories and rated their vividness and emotionality prior to and following 96 seconds of making eye movements (EM) or keeping eyes stationary (ES); at 2, 4, 6, and 10 seconds into the intervention; then followed by regular larger intervals throughout the 96-second intervention. Results revealed a significant drop compared to the ES group in emotionality after 74 seconds compared to a significant drop in vividness at only 2 seconds into the intervention. These results support that emotionality becomes reduced only after vividness has dropped. The results are discussed in light of working memory theory and visual imagery theory, following which the regular refreshment of the visual memory needed to maintain it in working memory is interfered with by eye movements that also tax working memory, which affects vividness first.     

Beliefs Contributing to HIV‐related Stigma in African and Afro‐Caribbean Communities in the Netherlands

Thirty years after the first diagnosis, people living with HIV (PLWH) around the world continue to report stigmatizing experiences. In this study, beliefs contributing to HIV‐related stigma in African and Afro‐Caribbean diaspora communities and their cultural context were explored through semi‐structured interviews with HIV‐positive (N = 42) and HIV‐negative (N = 52) African, Antillean and Surinamese diaspora community members in the Netherlands. Beliefs that HIV is highly contagious, that HIV is a very severe disease, and that PLWH are personally responsible for acquiring their HIV infection were found to contribute to HIV‐related stigma, as did the belief that PLWH are HIV‐positive because they engaged in norm‐violating behaviour such as promiscuity, commercial sex work, and, for Afro‐Caribbean diaspora, also homosexuality. These beliefs were found to be exacerbated and perpetuated by cultural taboos on talking about HIV and sexuality. HIV‐related stigma reduction interventions should focus on changing these beliefs and breaking cultural taboos on HIV and sexuality in a manner that is participatory and consistent with the current theory and empirical findings. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Priming of future States in complex motor skills

The ability to anticipate future states of perceived actions is an important faculty for motor control and the generation of coordinated social interaction. Here, we studied whether the perception of a static posture of a complex movement automatically activates representations of future states of this particular movement event. We did this by using a priming paradigm with photographs of a high-jump movement. Participants judged whether a picture depicted a posture from the approach or flight phase of that movement. To evaluate expertise-dependent effects of priming, non-athletes and athletes were compared. Results revealed faster responding when prime and target pictures were assigned to the same motor response (response priming), and when the temporal order of prime and target matched the temporal order of the depicted postures in a real high jump (temporal-order priming). Whereas experts showed a temporal-order effect even within the same response category, such an effect occurred for novices only between response categories. A second experiment confirmed that these between-group differences are due to domain-specific motor expertise (i.e., high jump) rather than to general motor experiences. Altogether our results suggest that motor expertise results in a more fine-grained posture-based movement representation.     

Is Traditional Gender Ideology Associated with Sex-Typed Mate Preferences? A Test in Nine Nations

Social role theory (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000) predicts that traditional gender ideology is associated with preferences for qualities in a mate that reflect a conventional homemaker-provider division of labor. This study assessed traditional gender ideology using Glick and Fiske's (1996, 1999) indexes of ambivalent attitudes toward women and men and related these attitudes to the sex-typed mate preferences of men for younger mates with homemaker skills and of women for older mates with breadwinning potential. Results from a nine-nation sample revealed that, to the extent that participants had a traditional gender ideology, they exhibited greater sex-typing of mate preferences. These relations were generally stable across the nine nations.     

A cross-cultural study of family functioning

The Family Assessment Device (FAD) was used to compare patterns of family functioning in two cultural settings, North America and Hungary. The sample size consisted of 95 nonclinical North American families and 58 nonclinical Hungarian families. No cross-cultural differences were found in the families' general functioning nor in their affective involvement or affective responsiveness as measured by the FAD. Hungarian families, however, perceived their functioning as significantly better than the North American families in problem-solving and in communication. North American families rated themselves significantly better than the Hungarians in setting family rules and boundaries and in meeting their family responsibilities. Results from this study suggest that cultural values can affect a family's functioning and that differences in areas of family functioning can be captured using the FAD. A discussion of broad societal values of the two cultures was used to interpret the contrasting patterns of family functioning.Cross-cultural studies serve many purposes. In general they provide knowledge about the different cultures under investigation. As such, they broaden and enrich our perspectives of ourselves and the world around us. More specifically they highlight similarities and differences across cultures, information that can be helpful in further refining our understanding of the impact of diverse and varying socio-political forces.A topic of particular interest to family therapists and researchers is family functioning in different cultural settings. In spite of continuing research in this area, few studies examine cross-cultural patterns of family interactions and even fewer do so with instruments specifically designed to assess family functioning.From a family perspective, particularly looking at pathology in family functioning, cross-cultural comparisons can be used to highlight areas of dysfunction common to families irrespective of the cultural context. From a cross-cultural perspective, family comparisons can be used to point out the cultural effects and emphases given to different dimensions of functioning within a common system (i.e., the family unit).Both conceptual and methodological problems have contributed to shortcomings in previous cross-cultural studies (Fabrega, 1974; Kleinman, 1987; Flaherty et al., 1988; Rogler, 1989). A basic criticism of such studies has been the assumption that meanings and values in one culture are equivalent to those in another.Another issue, which is particularly pertinent to our study, is the use of an instrument which is developed in one culture and administered in another cultural setting. A potential problem this raises is inferring cultural differences between groups when the translated and the original instruments are not actually comparable in meaning. In fact, one objective of the study was to see whether our own self-report measure of family functioning, the Family Assessment Device (FAD, Epstein et al., 1978, 1983), could be successfully used in another cultural setting.The following report is part of a larger research project, conducted in 1986–87, that compared depressed and nonclinical families across two cultures. The findings presented here are comparisons between nonclinical Hungarian and nonclinical North American families. In our earlier study differences in family interactions between clinically depressed and nonclinical families were evident in both cultural settings (Keitner et al., in press). It was not clear, however, if significant cross-cultural differences in family functioning would be found for the normal group of families and, if so, how these would differ from their ill counterparts. Inclusion of the normal families thus served two purposes, as controls in the larger study to test within cultural differences and as comparison groups in a separate analysis to test between cultural differences.A specific objective of this study was to contrast patterns of perceived family functioning in nonclinical Hungarian families and North American families. Another objective was to determine if the Family Assessment Device (FAD), a self-report measure of family functioning, could be successfully used in different cultural contexts. Hungary was chosen as an appropriate country of study for several reasons. It is at the crossroads of East and West, sharing enough similarities with western culture to validate comparisons, yet different enough in both its cultural and sociopolitical system that some differences could be expected to emerge. Because it is likely that the Hungarian social system is less familiar to readers than that of North American, the results are discussed with particular reference to Hungary.We would like to thank Drs. J. Furedi and T. Kurimay for help in translating the Family Assessment Device and Professors J. Szilard and Muszong-Kovacs for their support of this study. This work was supported in part by the Firan Foundation.     

Against definitions

Definitional accounts of language structure are explored in this paper. Several classes of arguments for definitions are reviewed; those which connect to: classical theories of reference, theories of informal validity, theories of sentence comprehension, and theories of concept learning. We suggest that, for each of these areas, accounts which rely upon definition are, in fact, not to be preferred on evidential grounds to plausible non-definitional alternatives. We also present a series of experimental observations bearing on one of these areas — that of sentence comprehension. We show that one widely cited class of examples of definitional structures — that of “causative verbs” — fails to affect subject judgements of those relations among the words of causative sentences which depend upon the putative definitional structures. Such subject judgements are independently demonstrated to be sensitive to structural relations of comparable type for other linguistically non-problematic types.     

Anomaly Detection: Eye Movement Patterns

The symptom of a garden path in sentence processing is an apparent anomaly in the input string. This anomaly signals to the parser that an error has occurred, and provides cues for how to repair it. Anomaly detection is thus an important aspect of sentence processing. In the present study, we investigated how the parser responds to unambiguous sentences that contain syntactic anomalies and pragmatic anomalies, examining records of eye movement during reading. While sensitivity to the two kinds of anomaly was very rapid and essentially simultaneous, qualitative differences existed in the patterns of first-pass reading times and eye regressions. The results are compatible with the proposal that syntactic information and pragmatic information are used differently in garden-path recovery.     

Some syntactic determinants of sentential complexity

The perceptual complexity of three lists of self-embedded sentences was evaluated in terms of the accuracy and time required for their paraphrase. The lists differed by the presence of relative pronouns in one list, their absence in a second and by the addition of adjectives to the third. It was predicted that the presence of the relative pronouns would effect the only significant change in performance. In both auditory and visual presentations of the sentence lists, the presence of the relative pronouns proved to be facilitating, while the presence of the adjectives produced no significant changes.